THE Pan Africanist Congress offered "no apology" for attacks on white civilians in the 1990s, South Africa's Truth Commission heard yesterday.
While the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (APLA) had targeted police and the military in the 1980s, "a new pattern arose in the 1990s where civilians within the white community were attacked," the PAC president, Mr Clarence Makwetu, acknowledged.
Referring to the post 1990 period, Mr Makwetu said: "The actual targets were decided by local commanders. Operatives often made errors that APLA had earlier avoided."
But the PAC leadership accepted responsibility for those errors. "We make no apologies. We have nothing to hide."
Mr Makwetu did, however, express regret about the murder in a black township near Cape Town of an American student, Amy Biehl, in August 1993. Youths with PAC sympathies were later convicted of murdering her and given long prison sentences.
Mr Makwetu complained that the commission failed to differentiate between those who fought against and for apartheid. "Our people, who were forced to fight a war of liberation, are being made to appear on the same platform as their aggressors."
Testimony from the PAC, an offshoot of President Mandela's African National Congress, came after a submission from the Afrikaner nationalist Freedom Front on Monday; it served as a dramatic prelude to the appearance today of Mr F.W. de Klerk, leader of the National Party, which came to power in 1948 on an apartheid manifesto and which governed South Africa for 46 years.
If 1990 marked a turning point in the PAC's armed struggle, it was important for another reason: it was the year in which Mr De Klerk rescinded the decree outlawing black nationalist movements, and invited them to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
Mr Makwetu did not offer an explanation for the apparent anomaly of attacks on civilians after 1990. But in fairness to the PAC, it should be noted that the country's transition to democracy between 1990 and 1994 was characterised by widespread violence.
In its testimony yesterday, the minuscule Democratic Party sought to justify its decision to serve in segregated political institutions, including the controversial tri-racial constitution of 1983.
It used these legal platforms to protest against racist laws, to spotlight human rights abuses and to encourage South Africans of all colours to negotiate a solution to the conflict wracking the country, said its veteran parliamentarian, Mr Colin Eglin.